Now we get to see how true to its ethos Google and Android stay. How long will Home remain on the Google Play store? How often, and how mysteriously, will it have "compatibility issues" with new releases? How long before launchers in general start to get buried under convenient categorization?

At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of "stock" Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both OEM and developer fronts, but Facebook's lurking presence will force the issue that much harder.

While the NPD no longer provides specific sales numbers for hardware, a representative does tell us that sales of the Wii U hardware for its first three months on the market are down 38% from what the Wii's numbers were at that same point.

We're told by someone with access to the NPD's data that sales for January were "well under" 100,000 units. By our estimates, sales were somewhere between 45,000 and 59,000 units for the month, which is lower than any of the three previous-generation home consoles sold in their worst months, with the possible exception of a recent performance by the original Wii.

If you have a Wii, there's no particular reason to buy a Wii U. If you don't have a Wii, there's no particular reason to buy a Wii U. Nintendo's full-year results in a week or two are likely to be ugly.

Samsung Electronics will launch a 6.3in phablet, a smartphone that doubles as a smart pad, as early as June. Samsung Electronics seems to create a niche market by targeting consumer groups that have been dissatisfied with the sizes of smart phones (in the 5in range) and smart pad (in the 7in range).

This will do nothing for those who find 5in too small and 6.3in too big. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)

Potential victims are encouraged to install a file that is included with messages like "this my favourite picture of you". If the malicious file is installed, one of its features is to turn the machine into a Bitcoin mining slave.

At least, [Google Maps is] what you see [on visiting maps.google.com] if you're using Safari on iOS, or Chrome, Android Browser, or Firefox on Android. Fire up Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, however, and you'll just get redirected to Google's mobile search page. This happens regardless of whether you have the browser configured to prefer desktop versions or mobile versions of sites.

Windows Phone users have noticed this, and they're not very happy. Widespread complaining around the Web reached a climax at the tail end of last week.

For those who'd forgotten that browser-specific sites can and do exist. Apple has done it with sites too in the past, sniffing for Safari and blocking access without the correct User-Agent. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)

My wish for this year is for Google to fork WebKit. They should take the WebKit code, give it a new name, and create a separate browser engine based on that. This, I argue, would be in both Google's own interest, and in the interest of the open Web.

Moen is an Opera developer. (He's no fan of Apple.) His reasons are clearly set out: "fragmentation should not only be a coincidence, but actually a strategy [for security]", for example. Wonder if it will play out as he forecasts. Opera joined Google in the fork. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)

Mozilla's mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we're supporting this mission by experimenting with what's next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow's faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That's why we've recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way.

This happened while all the Google/Apple/WebKit forking was happening. Samsung and Mozilla is an intriguing combination: why would each want to work with the other?

The project team's attempts to use encrypted e-mail systems such as PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") were abandoned because of complexity and unreliability that slowed down information sharing. Studies have shown that police and government agents – and even terrorists – also struggle to use secure e-mail systems effectively. Other complex cryptographic systems popular with computer hackers were not considered for the same reasons. While many team members had sophisticated computer knowledge and could use such tools well, many more did not.

Robert Silvie returned to his parents' home for a Mardi Gras visit this year and immediately noticed something strange: common websites like those beloning to Apple, Walmart, Target, Bing, and eBay were displaying unusual ads. Silvie knew that Bing, for instance, didn't run commodity banner ads along the bottom of its pristine home page — and yet, there they were. Somewhere between Silvie's computer and the Bing servers, something was injecting ads into the data passing through the tubes. Were his parents suffering from some kind of ad-serving malware infection? And if so, what else might the malware be watching — or stealing?